Since I’ve moved out to the west coast I’ve had more opportunity to do some traveling thanks to discount airlines, a stable paycheck and not being the furthest away from everything except Europe and I’ve been gleefully taking advantage of this.
I had my first encounter of Texas back in March when I traveled to Austin for South by SouthWest and to meet with the RoosterTeeth guys. I’m told that I didn’t truly get to experience Texas since I only went to Austin but I had a great time none the less, especially after driving nearly an hour with the RoosterTeeth guys to the middle of nowhere to experience true Texas BBQ. Mmmm brisquet…..
In May I headed up to San Francisco with my friends Adrian and Christine to run in the annual Bay to Breakers 12K (7.5 mile) race. This is the first run I’ve ever participated in and we decided to go so late that I didn’t have much time to get any training in so I’m amazed that I finished at all, let alone in under 2.5 hours. We all had a great time and the only thing I’d do different next time is not miss my ride back after the race and have to walk back to our friend Liz’s place in the pouring rain, adding another few miles to day. Oh did I mention we painted ourselves up as Smurfs for the race?
Just after I got back from SF I had the pleasure of traveling to the California State capitol of Sacramento to help the RoosterTeeth guys upgrade their servers. I ended up spending most of my time trapped inside an air conditioned data center pulling my hair out because of uncooperative hardware but what i did see of the city looked fairly nice, just somewhat small and spread out.
In July Jay came down to visit and we headed to Catalina Island with a bunch of my friends from San Diego do my Open Water certification dives. Jay did some snorkeling while we did our cert dives and then later did a discover Scuba dive and got hooked – too bad the water is freezing as hell back home and certs cost 4-5 times as much as they do here. It’s ok though I’ll just have to get him enrolled in a class the next time he comes down to visit.
In August I had my first trip to Mexico since I immigrated through Tijuana in January. I went to La Bufadora with Jack, Charity, Geoff and a bunch of the people from a local dive club, the Dive Bums. About 3 hours south of the border on the Baja penninsula La Bufadora is a very small town with some great diving and a natural ocean powered blow hole. We ended up doing 4 dives out of somewhat small wooden doreys with motors attached over two days in somewhat cold water (66 degrees). It was a great trip and not only did we get to see some really neat stuff like underwater arches, huge beds of sea urchins and lobsters but I got to experience the pleasure of the hour long wait at the border waiting to get back into the US where you get continually harassed by street vendors walking between the rows of standstill traffic.
In October I headed back to Catalina for a mini vacation and to start my Advanced Open Water cert. I ended up staying 5 days, made 9 dives and made a few new dive buddies. Catalina is probably my favorite diving site right now seeing as it’s only about 2 hours away and is a very relaxed, laid back place to spend a few days and dive.
Just a short week and a half after the Catalina trip I made my first trip to the Hawaiian islands with a trip to Maui with Jack, Charity, Nancy and John and his wife. We stayed in Kaanapali at a cottage owned by former Colts Punter Rohn Stark which was surprisingly affordable and very comfortable. While on Maui we did four dives at Molokini and saw a wide array of sea life including some black tipped reef sharks, did some snorkeling at Black Rock and saw (and touched) a sea turtle, biked down Mount Haleakala’a but not with one of those cheesy tours – we rented our own bikes and started right at the summit, all 10,530ft of it. Finally we drove up to the North side of the island and watched the famous surf break of Peahi (Jaws) and joked about the various ways we’d all die if we tried to go surf it and then continued on the famed windy Road to Hana with its 600 turns. We stayed our last night in the small town of Hana on the Northeast coast in a 4 bunkbed treehouse in the middle of the woods – it was nice to be out of the cities and in the middle of the wilderness again.
So there you have it, a somewhat abbreviated tale of my travels this year.
